Mr Jäger said: “The gas cloud around the comet’s nucleus is about four arc minutes wide.”

This means the green atmosphere spread out more than 161,550 miles (260,000km) in width.

The erupted cloud was almost twice as wide as the planet Jupiter – the larger planet in the solar system.

Comet PANSTARRS was first discovered by astronomers on September 23, 2017, by the PANSTARRS telescope at the summit of summit of the Haleakala volcano in Maui, Hawaii.

Amazing facts about Asteroids

Tue, April 4, 2017

The first asteroid was Ceres, discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801. There are currently over 600,000 known asteroids in our solar system. Most asteroids are found orbiting in the Asteroid Belt, a series of rings located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.